Most applications dealing with problems involving the face require a robust estimation of the facial salient points. Nevertheless, this estimation is not usually an automated preprocessing step in applications dealing with facial expression recognition. In this paper we present a simple method to detect facial salient points in the face. It is based on a prior Point Distribution Model and a rob...

This paper reports on the participation of FBK at the IWSLT 2009 Evaluation. This year we worked on the Arabic-English and Turkish-English BTEC tasks with a special effort on linguistic preprocessing techniques involving morphological segmentation. In addition, we investigated the adaptation problem in the development of systems for the ChineseEnglish and English-Chinese challenge tasks; in par...

OBJECTIVE Length of sperm exposure has been proposed to influence the risk of preeclampsia. The main objective was to determine the relationship between extent of exposure to sperm, both before and during pregnancy, and the risk of preeclampsia. STUDY DESIGN A case-control design was used where women with preeclampsia (cases) were matched with two women without preeclampsia (controls) by age ...

Many recent statistical parsers rely on a preprocessing step which uses hand-written, corpus-specific rules to augment the training data with extra information. For example, head-finding rules are used to augment node labels with lexical heads. In this paper, we provide machinery to reduce the amount of human effort needed to adapt existing models to new corpora: first, we propose a flexible no...

This report presents one selected strategy for dealing with the EUNITE competition task of prediction whether a bank client is active or not. The chosen classification model is based on an ensemble of weak classifiers. Each weak classifier is a simple n-tuple unit, which is probing part of the input attributes and which can deliver as output a vote on one or both classes – active or passive. Th...

In a population-based sample, the authors examined the validity of preeclampsia and related diagnoses recorded in a mandatory Danish national hospital discharge registry and in a standardized telephone interview of women who gave birth between 1998 and 2002. Using a "gold standard" for preeclampsia defined in accordance with the guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecolo...

This paper describes the application of a quantitative psychoacoustical signal preprocessing model for objective speech quality measurement. The preprocessing is applied to transform the original and the distorted speech signal to an internal representation which is thought of as the information that is accessible to higher neural stages of perception. From a comparison of these internal repres...

BACKGROUND Evidence suggests the involvement of calcium and magnesium metabolism in the pathophysiology of preeclampsia. However, findings from studies are heterogenous and inconsistent. AIM The study aimed to compare the total serum calcium and magnesium levels in preeclamptic women with that of normotensive pregnant women. SUBJECTS AND METHODS A cross-sectional subjects of eighty pregnant...